I have been using Evernote as part of my daily life for about four months now. After reading about it on such sites as Lifehacker and 43 Folders and hearing of an Android app in the works, I decided to make the plunge.

Evernote allows you to store and organize your notes in the cloud so you can retrieve them later anywhere easily. A note can be any bit of text, audio, a screenshot, etc. You enter these into Evernote through the use of a computer application, web browser plug-in or mobile app. Evernote then indexes the information automatically (or you can do it yourself) so you can find it when you need it. One neat feature is that it will even figure out text in a photo and use that information.

Obviously, in order to be be able to recall the information when and where you want, a mobile app is key. Last December Evernote unveiled their Android app and it is a beast (in a good way). This is no scaled down version of the PC/Mac client. This is a fully functional application to create, save, and recall the information you want. In addition, every note you make can be tagged with your location so you can search your notes for ones written near a location. One thing lacking from this app (and the Android platform in general) is the ability to take screenshots of your phone. Not a huge loss but obviously missing when compared to the PC versions.

It is a free service, up to a point. You are limited to 40MB of uploads per month and you are limited to images, audio, text, and PDF file types (and the text of the PDF is not indexed). By going for the $45 subscription for a year you get up to 500MB of uploads a month, any file types (including Microsoft Office files) and text of PDFs are indexed. I have been happy with my free account. I only use it for quick text notes and lists and an occassional audio recording.

Since the release of the Android app I notice I no longer deal with a pocket full of scribbled notes at the end of the day (or leaving them in my pockets at the end of the day and having them go through the wash) or losing a good idea I had but didn’t have a pen to write it down. Storing all your little notes in the cloud makes perfect sense. Is this app going to make you an organizational maven? Probably not. But it is yet another tool (and a truly geeky one at that) that you can use to get organized.

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http://www.rickety.us rick@rickety

After reading your post I tried Evernote. It works really well on the Nexus. Thanks for the tip.

http://www.nashvilletn-real-estate.com Dean Williams

I currently use AK Notepad and a Sticky Note widget app. Downloading Evernote to give it a shot. The video seemed completely worthless, so I’m going to have to play with it to really learn what it is all about.

http://Website helikopter

my biggest (and only) problem with evernote is that you can’t store your notes on your device, so offline usage is a no go. this can be very frustrating if you don’t have a good 3g coverage, especially when you want to watch photos or listen to voice notes as they have to be downloaded every time you want to view/listen to them. and what’s more frustrating: if you’re in a dead zone, you won’t have any access to your notes at all. i think that it’s quite lame and makes the app unreliable.

http://txhoudini.com Eric Weiss

That’s a really good point I hadn’t considered. In Austin we are very fortunate for our very good coverage. Thanks for pointing that out.

http://Website Lutherian

I totally agree!
You have to fork out a huge amount of money to have offline access. Screw that.
Well said.
Soon someone’s gonna make an open source version that will piggyback off the gmail interface, and then Evernote will see it’s arse

http://Website helikopter

one more thing: that’s why i use 3banana by snaptic. you can sync your notes with a web application (where you can also create notes, like in evernote), use hashtags, and many more exciting things. definitely not as comortable as evernote but offline availability makes it more useable for me.

http://Website Tony

This seems promising for me to use. I am constantly adding websites to my instapaper account and adding short lists to my google docs account that way i can access them from where. But now this website lets me add everything to the same place and it suppose to organize it for you. Oh i am totally trying this out for a couple weeks.

http://Website evernote sucks

no offline notes! useless! use 3banana

http://Website Kurt

Still waiting for an Evernote widget – 3bananas has it – and I like it.

http://Website Mark

hey, the 2d barcode link is broken
after scanning the barcode i get the following message…

there are no matches in android market for the search: pname:pname:com.evernote…

http://Website hsan

Evernote seem no longer to be available on Android Market, (no matches for Evernote when you search Android market, as Mark said)

http://Website Tom Daly

I have been trying to use Evernote for a week on my Droid 2. Not only does it not work (the notes do not sync with my PC) but they have the worst customer service system in the world, and I’ve seen them all. In the last three days, they close my case numbers four times BEFORE the problem was solved. They will not allow a dialogue between you and any customer services person. They email you, but they won’t accept your email back. I cancelled my Premium membership and do not recommend this softward for anyone who must reliably use it.

http://Website Hal

Disclaimer: I’m not an EverNote employee, however I do rely on EverNote to maintain a semi-firm grasp on my sanity. I access my EverNote notebooks primarily from my Mac at work, but also from my Android phone (HTC Aria) and via the web client when I’m teaching. I would literally lose my mind without this app. I use it to take and access notes in meetings and on phone calls, and an unintended side effect is that people think I have a photographic memory because I’ll reference an something that was said in a meeting or a conference call that happened months ago.

Regarding Tom’s comment above, the only difficulty I’ve ever run into with the Android client is forgetting to save a note and losing its content, but that only happened to me once and it was a solid case of operator error. With the latest Android client (it was updated recently, seems like it was either January 2011 or December 2010) you have to try hard to discard a note without saving it. I’ve never had any contact with their support department so I can’t say anything good or bad about them.

Personally I love EverNote and have nothing but good things to say about it, but obviously YMMV.

John Simon

Hi guys , I think the evernote is good but I found new site http://www.websendsms.com it’s good too. I just have to write my notes and remainders.